Silver Jacket

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  • The Language Police Wonder

    Question_marksMark at Language Log made a post on Friday that touched a nerve and brought up something I’ve been pondering recently: the acceptability of using a question mark with a wonder statement. Specifically, he said:

    "I wonder how many such templatic clichés we have in English?"

    Is he asking the readers whether he wonders this?

    Heck no. BUT maybe he’s soliciting responses from readers, in which case the sentence literally means: "How many such templatic clichés do we have in English?" In that case, his declarative sentence punctuated by a question mark would be idiomatic usage (if it has indeed achieved the rank of idiom.) The words are arranged like a declaration, but are meant to act as a question.

    I’m debating whether to make such usage acceptable in my own personal stylebook. You see, I’m very touchy on the use of question marks with wonder statements because I have emotions at stake. Frequently when people write "I wonder if X is Y?", they are using a sloppy formation of "I wonder: Is X Y?" Irrefutable cases of this terrible mistake (Mark’s is ambiguous) have become a pet peeve–here’s where the emotions come in–because of an experience in 5th grade.

    One day, my English teacher read us sentences and we had to name them fact or opinion. I received a sentence along the lines of "My favorite color is blue." This is a fact, albeit a fact about someone’s opinion. The teacher insisted the sentence was an opinion. As if it were: "Blue is the best color." My stubborn resolution halted class and resulted in raised voices and hurt feelings. Sixteen years later, I still feel the sting of anger.

    Facts about opinions are still facts. And declarations about questions are still declarations.

  • Hot in Herre. No, Seriously, I’m on Fire.

    DdiWell there is now a game out called "Dance Dance Immolation!" You put on a fireproof silver jacket, dance around like a spazz, and get flames shot at you. Sounds familiar:

    If only I had the fireproof facemask then (January 1997) that I have now. But at least I didn’t have any facial hair to singe off.

    [P.S. If you are pop-culture-deficient, a band named The Prodigy made a b&w music video in 1996 where a strange man dances around in a big tunnel and screams in a British accent, "I’m the firestarter! Twisted firestarter!" You can watch it here. My friends Ken and Glen and I decided that was a bad message to send to the kids, so we created "Twisted Firefighter" for their public access TV show, "The Ken and Glen Show." The more you know, kiddies…]

  • Goatse Strikes the Times

    Anil_goatseI began reading a story called "Loosing Google's Lock on the Past" in the New York Times this morning and was amazed when I scrolled down to see a picture of Anil Dash wearing a Goatse t-shirt. Holy crap! How could such a thing happen? Doing a quick scan of the blogosphere to see who else noticed (everyone, duh) I found one early post proclaiming Anil's stunt "one of the greatest accomplishments imaginable." Here's Anil's take on the issue.

    It reminds me of editing photos for the Groton School yearbook as a senior. I had to shoot all the guys' dorms, and one dorm (Hrasky's I think) decided that everyone would give the shocker (into the the air, of course, not to each other) in the photo. I stopped laughing long enough to snap the shutter a few times, but the pics were snubbed by the deans, and I had to retake them. Later I learned the deans hadn't protested 25 guys doing the shocker (they would not have been alone in overlooking its significance) but because of one guy holding a sub roll in his junk area to simulate an engorged phallus. Minus the misguided leavened largess, the posse's premier pose would have been preserved in print in perpetuity. D'oh!

    Of course boarding school shenanigans extend to t-shirts as well. At Groton, each dorm designs its own t-shirts for field day in the spring. When I was in 10th grade, Mr. Berger's dorm had a lot of testosterone and liked to refer to themselves as Berger's Beef. To complete the theme, they illustrated their shirts with a giant cartoon of a beaver riding a bull. Oh lord. Somehow it made it past the deans. (The dorm heads, Mr. Berger included, had nothing to do with the shirts—or yearbook photos—mind you.)

    I believe someone received some flack and the deans tightened their focus after that. But the artist behind those shirts was in my dorm (Gemmell's) the next year and produced a subversive masterpiece. There's one large design on the front. Down the left it says "Gemmell's" and across the bottom it says "great scandal." The bulk of the image is an abstract swirly pattern. The deans, of course would look for something hidden in the swirls. Indeed, the hidden message is not hard to find: words reading "la casa de los toros" (the house of the bulls). BUT… Fold the shirt over onto itself, like the inside back cover of Mad Magazine, and a huge erect cock appears in the center. At the bottom, "great scandal" becomes "grundal." SWEET. And as if there were any doubt, the "a" becomes "#1." my friend's cocky concoction truly made me appreciate how few works achieve that venerated hat trick of being ornate, cryptic, and vulgar at the same time.

  • Knocking White Boyz Out

    Well I’ve been neglecting good ol’ SilverJacket because I went on a long trip back East (Boston, New York, Providence) but I’m back.

    FreestyleeventflyerOne spectacle I caught in the Big Apple was the DVD release party for a documentary called "Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme." The party/show featured several key people in the film, including Bobbito, Supernatural, Craig G, DJ Organic, and Lord Finesse. The movie’s climax is probably the meeting of two legendary grandmaster freestyle MC’s, Supernat and Craig G. These dudes can freestyle better than most cats can rap on album. And here on stage they met again for the first time in 8 years. Someone else at the party actually recorded and posted some footage here.

    I must say Supernat (spitting image of Forest Whitaker) stole the show on this occasion. One of his stunts was to ask the audience to pull random shit from their pockets and hold it up. He swept from one side of the audience to the other, grabbing items from people’s hands and spitting rhymes about them. My favorites: a blunt, which he tried to light; and the complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, single volume, hardcover. No one could trip him up.

    An awkward moment came later in the show when Lord Finesse began calling out a rhyme from "Juice (Know the Ledge)", the 1992 track by Rakim. He yelled "Knocking niggaz off!" and then held the mic out toward us, at which point I instinctively threw my arm in the air and continued the line by yelling at top volume "Knocking niggaz out!" He then paused and looked at us. "I know some of you white dudes in the audience were looking around, wondering if you could yell that shit." The audience laughs. "Well I give you permission." The audience laughs again. I’m thinking, yeah, I guess it’s weird for white people to yell rap lyrics. And then I realize what I was yelling. Shit, I just yelled "niggaz" in a crowded theater. Suddenly I felt self-conscious and for the rest of the song called back to Finesse, "Knocking [mumble] out."

  • Watching TV Makes You Better at Watching TV

    Cathtub2Steven Johnson wrote recently in the New York Times Magazine that "Watching TV Makes You Smarter." Oh, how I would love to believe that. Even if it’s true, Johnson makes the claim only about recent television programming, not what I watched during my long school vacations. Zero mention of Punky Brewster, MacGyver, or Yo! MTV Raps.

    You see, I used to watch up to 12 hours of television a day. I often wonder how much more I could achieve with my mind if I had spent that time reading or, heck, watching paint dry. I sometimes console myself by saying that it didn’t rot my brain–there are many types of literacy, and watching so much TV just made me learn to think in a particular way. Maybe not a way useful to the classroom, but a way that will make me wildly suited to some fabulously constructive endeavor someday. For a while I was very interested in going to grad school for media studies. Finally, a way to turn my years of experience with TV into an asset!

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  • As Smacked By

    The smack on "as told to," as laid down by me:

    When a person (Subject) tells a story, and it is adapted for publication by a writer (Writer), the byline is generally written, "By Subject, as told to Writer."

    When publications say, "as told to," they really mean, "as told by." We are reading a subject’s story as told by a writer. It’s based on what the subject said, but the writer has interpreted it.

    If the entire article were a direct quote from Subject to Writer, then we would be reading the story as told to the writer. But in that case the writer would merely be playing the role of transcriptionist, and would deserve no place in the byline.

  • Square and Spreading

    Wacky Weblink Wednesday…

    Completely reasonable science, but the video is still wacky. I mean, robotic cubes? Whoda thunkit? And why are they so creepy?

    Check today’s New Scientist article on the self-replicating robots from Cornell.

  • Machines of all Times

    Harold_and_maudeRecently Automobile Magazine posted their "highly subjective" list of the 100 Coolest Cars. Necessarily, there’s a lot to like and a lot to dislike about the list. I’m finicky about cars and car design, so I could nitpick all day. But I’ll keep myself to two brief comments.

    Number 10 is the Jaguar E-Type. Sure, it’s a cool car, but I would offer SO MUCH MORE props if I saw someone roll through in a an E-Type/hearse splice like the one in "Harold and Maude."

    And, secondly, where was the DeLorean?

    DeloreanAs a sidenote, I must point out that there’s been a DeLorean parked at a house on my block at least since I moved here a year ago. But it’s always under cover so I never knew what it was. That is, until my friend Natalie pointed it out. "You know that’s a DeLorean, right?" Holy crap.

  • Playing Their Game

    EndersgameAccording to an article in The New York Times on Wednesday, Les Perelman of MIT has noticed two things about the scoring of the essay section in the new SAT. First, score is highly correlated with essay length: "If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you’d be right over 90 percent of the time." Second, score is not correlated with accuracy: according to the official guide for scorers, "You are scoring the writing, and not the correctness of facts."

    Oh, boy, what fun! Manic fabricators will have a field day.

    I can’t help but reminisce about my own days of pre-college standardized testing. The College Board, which administers the SAT, also administers the AP exams. Taking the English Literature AP, I had a problem. I felt pretty good until I got to the big essay section at the end. It asks a question and then says, "Answer this using one of the books listed below or an equally high-brow piece of literature." I don’t remember the question, but I wasn’t comfortable answering it using any of the suggested tomes. I also could not bring to mind any other classic I had read recently that I could apply to the essay. Fuck.

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  • Bologna Snowflakes

    Bologna_snowflakesDid you ever make bologna snowflakes when you were a kid?  If only bologna were thinner and more foldable.